"Visions of Empire" explores America's greatest railroad challenge

SAN MARINO - In this age of Amtrak, the epic scale of America's transcontinental railroad endeavor and the sheer "entrepreneurial audacity" of its builders remain a source of wonder to Huntington Library curator Peter Blodgett.

And he's pretty sure the story told in "Visions of Empire: The Quest for a Railroad Across America, 1840-1880," a major exhibition opening April 21, will have the same effect on others.

"I can tell from the number of people, beginning with members of the Huntington staff and spreading outward, who have expressed such excitement about the forthcoming show," said Blodgett, the curator of western historical manuscripts.

The exhibit, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, features some 200 items, most never before seen in public.

Almost all of them come from the Huntington's own holdings, including maps, photographs, engravings, illustrations, newspapers, magazines, letters and diaries, often from major collections purchased by Henry Huntington at the turn of the 20th century.

"We are borrowing a handful of artifacts, a couple of hand tools from our friends at the California Railway Museum in Sacramento - a shovel, the head of a pickax and a sledgehammer," Blodgett said.

"We have some wonderful photos of the process of construction, including various crew images and, in the case of the Central Pacific Railroad, including Chinese laborers, with views of the landscape they had to confront," he said. "The Sierra Nevada was probably the most difficult, but even the Great Plains, where you presume there wouldn't be challenges, presented their own challenge - it was a landscape almost entirely without timber. There was no source of railroad ties, it was unsettled by Euro-Americans, there was no industrial base. Every bolt, every rail, every split, every tool had to be shipped further and further as the railroad moved inland."

For such an epic venture there had to be great characters - including the "Big Four" of Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington - great fortunes to be made or lost, and great change left in its wake, Blodgett said.

"Sometimes its easy to forget just how great the divide is, what came before and what came after" the railroad, he said.

"The railroad became intricately connected to the creation of a new way Americans saw their landscape," he said. By the 1880s, he said, "scenic tourism" had become one of the railroad's premier selling points, with travel posters touting the wonders of Yellowstone, Colorado, the Grand Canyon, and all the great national parks.

"That continued all the way throughout the 1960s, at which point the automobile finally triumphed over the Iron Horse," he said.

"Visions of Empire" captures all the monumental breadth of the venture in chronological order, from 1840 through 1880; it also covers the transformative changes it brought to Native Americans - often "forcibly dispossessed" of their land, Blodgett said - and the unrecorded toll on Chinese and Irish laborers.

It would be a "pretty tough challenge" to build the transcontinental railroad today, Blodgett said.

But the same confident entrepreneurial spirit that built 1,700 miles of track took Americans to the moon, created the Internet and completed the interstate highway system, he said.

And the same big egos and "more than a little eccentricity" can still be involved, he said.

"Reading Steve Jobs' biography," he joked. "But they had the same ability to look, and imagine somehow how to overcome the risks entailed. It's an amazing notion."

The exhibit will run through July 23, and several related events are scheduled during the run.